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By combining these factors the temperate forest biome is made.

The peoples of the African rainforests found life relatively easy, mainly because of the same bounty that kept the gorillas and chimps at home in them, while loser apes were and learned to walk upright. For those reasons, agriculture and civilization came late to the rainforests. Domestication in equatorial Africa was likely not but the result of diffusion from the Fertile Crescent.

With the success of the end-Cretaceous bolide hypothesis, there was a movement in some circles to explain mass extinctions with bolide events, . If bolide events were responsible for all mass extinctions, then the , galactic explanation might still have relevance. Even though an end-Permian bolide event was unveiled with great fanfare and media attention in 2001, it does not appear to be a valid extinction hypothesis today, and invoking bolide impacts to explain mass extinction seems to have been a passing fad that has seen its best days. The oxygen hypothesis for explaining extinctions, evolutionary novelty, and radiations is similarly called a current fashion in some circles, and time will tell how the hypothesis fares, although it seems to have impressive explanatory value.

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Peter Ward led an effort to catalog the fossil record before and after Romer’s Gap, which found a dramatic that did not resume until about 340-330 mya. Romer’s Gap seems to have coincided with low-oxygen levels of the late Devonian and early Carboniferous. If coincided with a halt in colonization, just as the adaptation to breathing air was beginning, the obvious implication is that low oxygen levels hampered early land animals. Not just the lung had to evolve for the up-and-coming amphibians, but the entire chest cavity had to evolve to expand and contract while also allowing for a new mode of locomotion. When amphibians and splay-footed reptiles run, they cannot breathe, as their mechanics of locomotion prevent running and breathing at the same time. Even walking and breathing is generally difficult. This means that they cannot perform any endurance locomotion but have to move in short spurts. This is why today’s predatory amphibians and reptiles are ambush predators. They can only move in short bursts, and then have to stop, breathe, and recover their oxygen deficit. In short, they have no stamina. This limitation is called . The below image shows the evolutionary adaptations that led to overcoming Carrier's Constraint. Dinosaurs overcame it first, and it probably was related to their dominance and the extinction or marginalization of their competitors. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The period succeeding the Devonian is called the (c. 359 to 299 mya), for reasons that will become evident. The second attempt of vertebrates to invade land (which is considered to be about a 30-million-year gap). After all mass extinctions, it took millions of years for ecosystems to recover, even tens of millions of years, and markedly different ecosystems and plant/animal assemblages often replaced what existed before the extinction. The Devonian spore-forests were destroyed, and outside of the peat swamps, the tallest trees in the Tournaisian Gap were about as tall as I am, and even in the swamps, the tallest trees were about ten meters tall, as they were before the Hangenberg event.

There must be some connectors connecting every part of forest.

About 183 mya, linked to and events hit ammonoids hard, as usual. The extinction seems to have been confined to the oceans. Along with the appearance of , reefs slowly recovered in the Jurassic, and by the Jurassic’s end, lined Tethyan shores. Low-oxygen tolerating marine animals proliferated in the Jurassic. Ammonoids, with , developed large, thin-shelled varieties that housed the large gills probably required to navigate the Jurassic’s low-oxygen waters. Also, a different kind of cephalopod, , became plentiful in the Jurassic. The first appeared in the Jurassic, and they also developed a superior respiration system; they put their gills within their armor and developed a pump gill. As most seashore visitors know, crabs are quite tolerant of exposure to air, much as nautiloids suffer no ill effects when exposed to air for a short time. Crabs proliferated with the late Jurassic’s reefs, to (called the Tithonian event, or end-Jurassic extinction), which was caused by a sudden drop in sea levels, and the extinction again appeared to be largely restricted to marine biomes. On land, there were extinctions of , , and .

As land’s surface area shrank, the continents became wetter, as all land became relatively close to the oceans. In the late Jurassic there was a cooling period, the coldest time of the entire Mesozoic, with even some mountainous and polar glaciation, but end-Jurassic volcanism kept carbon dioxide levels high and the climate warmed. Warm-climate plants during the Cretaceous, and forest went all the way , which has fascinated scientists as they try envisioning a biome which was in the dark for nearly half the year. The Cretaceous was generally a hot, wet time on Earth.

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Restoration of the forest is returning it to its most natural state.

The direct ancestors of dinosaurs, , first appeared in the late Permian, and some survived into the Triassic as . Until recently, the first true dinosaur was widely considered to be , which appeared about 231 mya. Eoraptor looks like a miniature and in fact is in the terrestrial dinosaur line that culminated with the Lizard King, called . A , however, made the case that , dated to 243 mya, is either the first dinosaur yet discovered or a close cousin to it. Birds are also , as the only survivor of that line and the only surviving dinosaurs. Eoraptor was about a meter long and weighed ten kilograms. The time from the to the first dinosaurs spanned nearly 100 million years, but there was nothing spectacular about them then, as their early years were dominated by , then , and then . Why dinosaurs rose to prominence has been a source of controversy and debate, but the contending answers are energy-based.

But its devastation is nothing compared to Brazil’s Atlantic forest.

Birds are warm-blooded and today’s reptiles are cold-blooded. is a vast, complex issue, and warm-bloodedness or cold-bloodedness appears to be a result of evolutionary cost-benefit outcomes. The first vertebrates that , the first dominant reptiles had , and therapsids may have at least dabbled in chemical means of internal temperature regulation, although the evidence is thin. But the evidence for dinosaurian internal temperature regulation is strong, and the surviving therapsid line, the mammals, also developed internal temperature regulation.

Forest Service in maintaining the forest.

The Triassic began hot and ended hot, and the Jurassic and Cretaceous were also hot, so staying warm was not a significant issue for dinosaurs. stayed cool by becoming aquatic, and for land-based dinosaurs, features such as plates apparently replaced the sails of for both heating and cooling, and like the synapsid sail, those plates may have also been used for display. Also, like the cliché, many large herbivorous dinosaurs lived near cooling swamps, although the issue has been controversial. Cooling swamps and protective water holes that we see in the tropics today were a major aspect of Mesozoic landscapes. But the thermoregulatory aspect that most work is directed toward today is how dinosaurs kept warm. There is compelling evidence that dinosaurs regulated their body temperature in myriad ways, including internal chemistry. All bipedal animals today are endotherms and they all have four-chambered hearts, as dinosaurs did. , dinosaurs living near the poles (, ), and of dinosaur bones all support the idea that , but one of the more intriguing areas is that of . Like tree rings, bones have seasonal growth rings and they have been read for many dinosaur fossils. They have been used to determine dinosaurian life expectancies. could live to be about 30, giant could live to be 50, and smaller dinosaurs, as with smaller mammals, lived shorter lives. The tiny ones only lived three-to-four years and the mid-sized ones lived seven-to-fifteen years. Growth rates also provide thermoregulation evidence. Tyrannosaurs had juvenile growth spurts and largely stopped growing as adults, and sauropods had growth rates equivalent to today’s whales, which are Earth’s fastest growing animals. But there is also evidence of ectothermic dynamics. The great size of dinosaurs would have led to relatively easy ways to stay warm, as large animals have a greater mass-to-surface area ratio, like the way in which . Also, in the generally hot Mesozoic times, staying warm would have been fairly easy, particularly for huge dinosaurs.